Simon Said Read online

  They walked toward the excavation site. Simon's friend David Morgan was a proponent of the old-fashioned vertical method of archaeological excavation. That is, rather than remove the entire area of a site layer by layer, he believed in sinking trenches in careful patterns, leaving most of the site undisturbed. First, of course, he had used a metal detector and a magnetometer where he and Simon had deduced the old kitchen would be, and he had quickly revealed the stone foundations of the building.

  Simon, Morgan, and Gates stepped over the pegs and string that marked off the site into grids. Simon could see that the first trench had been dug halfway across the site, until, he supposed, the body had been found. Picks and shovels lay scattered where they had been dropped. A sieve lay half in and half out of the trench.

  "Watch it," David warned as he guided them around a large hole that was lined with stone. "That's an old cistern—Civil War era, maybe—and it's still holding water. We haven't got a secure cover on it yet."

  As they approached the body, Simon remembered that David insisted on handdigging his trenches, much to his students' chagrin. He wouldn't permit a Bobcat anywhere near his digs. Simon wondered who had been wielding the shovel when it struck the corpse.

  Gates leaned down to remove a tarpaulin covering one end of the trench. "You'd better take a deep breath," he said. "This is not pretty."

  I'll bet, Simon thought. Uncharacteristically, David took his arm as Simon bent over the body.

  Simon saw only the corpse's face for a few seconds before he looked away, but he would remember the minutest details for many days. After all, the only dead people Simon had seen before were his parents laid out at a funeral home. Without the benefit of the embalmer's art, this creature in the ground in front of him could have auditioned for a part in a horror movie.

  The body seemed to have been prepared for burial. It was shrouded neatly in a quilt of the wedding-ring pattern—he could just see the faded patches flowing in interlocking rings around her torso. Fingers that were mostly bone were crossed demurely over her chest. Most of the fleshy parts of the face, including the eyes, were gone, but some of the cartilage from her ears and nose still clung to the skull. Strands of short, curly black hair adhered to her head. He registered the miniature cameos in her ears and the larger matching one at her throat before he looked away.

  "God," Simon said. He suppressed an intense urge to vomit. For a second, everything he could see was tinged with red and he was very hot. Morgan felt Simon quail and he tightened his grip on his arm. His friend's eyes looked out at him from deep inside dark sockets. Morgan mentally castigated himself.

  "Take it easy," Morgan said. "You've had a shock—I should never have suggested that you look at her. I forgot you weren't experienced at this." Gates was concerned by Simon's reaction, too.

  "I'm just sorry as hell," Gates said. "What a stupid thing for me to do." "It's okay," Simon said. He took a deep breath and collected himself.

  "No, it's not," Gates said. "Just because the three of us are used to looking at dead bodies of various descriptions doesn't mean we should go dragging a civilian into this situation. Can I get you anything?"

  Something cold, Simon thought. "A Coke, please," Simon said. "There's a machine in the Preservation Society office at the back of the house." With a gesture, Gates dispatched the policeman for the drink.

  "No breakfast, huh?" Dr. Boyette said.

  "Not much," Simon said. Not much sleep, either, he thought.

  The policeman brought Simon his Coke and he drained it gratefully. Morgan was relieved to see that his color improved right away. "It's going to be a lot of work to identify this woman after all this time," Gates said. "I was hoping you could give us a start. But she's not necessarily connected to the history of the house. She could have been brought here from somewhere else. She could be anyone."

  "But she's not just anyone," Simon said.

  The three men stared at him.

  "What do you mean?" Gates said.

  "I know who she is," Simon said.

  Chapter Three

  "I TOLD YOU," MORGAN SAID TRIUMPHANTLY.

  Gates looked at Simon incredulously. "Excuse me?" he said. "I didn't hear you say you could identify this body, did I?" "Yes, I think I can," Simon said.

  "Well, then, who is it?" said Gates.

  "She's Anne Haworth Bloodworth," Simon answered. "She disappeared on April ninth, 1926. The whole state was mobilized to look for her—later even the Pinkerton Detective Agency got involved. She was never found."

  "You can't possibly know the corpse is this Bloodworth woman," Boyette said. "Believe me," David said. "If Simon says this is Anne Bloodworth, it's Anne Bloodworth. I've never known him to be wrong about something like this." Gates shook his head in disbelief. "I have to say, son, that it doesn't seem reasonable to me that you could get a minute's look at a decomposed corpse and ... well, we'll have to have more tangible evidence to go on."

  Simon felt much better. He was on his own ground now. He pulled his arm away from Morgan. "Come with me," he said. Boyette broke off from the group. "Not me," he said. "I've got to get this lady out of the ground and into the frig. Let me know, Sergeant, what your mouthpiece says about an autopsy."

  The three men walked toward the house. Simon was on the Bloodworth House's board of directors and had a set of keys. He let them into the original section of the house, the three rooms built in 1775. The rooms were narrow, dim, and the ceilings were low. Gates knocked his head on a doorjamb.

  "They didn't grow them as big as you back then," Simon said. "The average person in the eighteenth century was around my size. But it was still crowded, with six or seven family members living in three rooms like this. Privacy is a twentieth-century invention."

  He led them down a short, low hall, past a curving stair, and into a radically different atmosphere, the nineteenth-century addition. The Greek Revival drawing and dining rooms rose twelve feet in the air; the ceilings were covered with decorative moldings and the tall windows draped with yellow silk. Light poured in through the thick, rippled old glass.

  "Still not a lot of rooms for a big family," Simon said, "but at least you don't feel you could suffocate in here." He turned into the dining room. Except for repairs and some redecorating, the room had been left very much the same as when Adam Bloodworth had used it, and Simon's research showed he had altered very little in the house and its furniture. Neither had Charles Bloodworth, from whom Adam had inherited it, for that matter. The table was laid with dinnerware ordered from China and silver made in Boston. Some of it had the name Revere stamped on it. The buffet held a huge silver serving piece heaped with porcelain fruit and vegetables. A crystal chandelier was suspended over the table. It still held candles, but sconces positioned on the walls would have provided gaslight.

  A display case holding a number of the Bloodworths' personal possessions stood against the wall. Charles's cigar humidor, pocket pistol, and fountain pen, together with Adam's silver cigarette case and mustache comb, were neatly labeled and locked inside.

  "Look at this, Sergeant," Simon said, leading the men toward the fireplace. Over the mantel was the portrait of a young woman. Or rather, it was an enlarged photograph that had been touched with oils to simulate a color portrait. Simon suspected it was a high school graduation picture. The subject had a sweet face, framed by short, curly black hair and bangs—what they called "a bob and a fringe" back in the twenties. She was dressed in the unbecoming fashion of her time—a straight chemise with a dropped waist, which made everyone who was more than painfully thin look chunky. The dress was white and had a sailor collar, which contributed to Simon's conclusion that it was a graduation picture. The pose wasn't typical, though. She was sitting on a garden bench, leaning forward on her hands and smiling directly into the camera. Her gaze was eager and forceful. She looked as if she had a lot to look forward to.

  "This is Anne Bloodworth," Simon said simply. "The portrait was done sometime after her eighteenth birthda
y. I believe it has hung here ever since." Gates studied the picture carefully. "I agree there is some resemblance, if there can be a resemblance between a half-decayed corpse and a picture," Gates said. "But this is just a coincidence. I still say our body could be anybody."

  "Look at the jewelry," Simon said.

  The two miniature cameos in the young woman's ears and the larger one pinned to a ribbon at her throat seemed to jump out of the portrait. "I'll be damned!" Gates exploded. Without another word, he turned and left the room. A few minutes later, David and Simon could see him out the back window, trotting toward the mortuary van.

  "You're amazing," said David. "No I'm not," Simon replied. "I just have a good memory. I studied this picture for a long time after I read about Anne Bloodworth's disappearance. Half of it's intuition, anyway—I just knew when I looked at the corpse that it was Anne."

  "The police might need more proof than some earrings and your instincts," David said. "But I'm convinced."

  Gates walked back into the room and up to the picture. He didn't look at either man, but he studied the picture for a full five minutes. He shook his head. Then he turned and studied Simon just as intently. "A corpse from the right time period, the right hair color and build, and identical jewelry. And we know for a fact that a young woman disappeared. It's circumstantial, but convincing. However," and he sighed, "I don't think the medical examiner can officially ID her based on what we have here."

  "What will you do now?" David asked.

  "I don't know," Gates said. "The police attorney will have to tell me if this is a case or just a break in routine for us."

  "It was hardly a routine event for Anne Bloodworth," Simon said quietly. He turned and offered Gates his hand. "I enjoyed meeting you."

  "Listen," Gates said. "Are you going to be in your office tomorrow? I'd like to drop by and pick your brain some more." "Sure," Simon replied. "Just don't ask me to look at any more corpses, okay?" All three men laughed, and Simon left the room.

  "That young man has a brain," Gates said.

  "He has a photographic memory," David said. "He can remember anything he has ever read or jotted on a note card. But it's not just that. He's got instinct, or intuition, or whatever you want to call it."

  The two of them could see Simon Shaw walking across the campus from the window in the dining room. "He'd make a good cop, then," Gates said.

  Chapter Four

  THE MORNING'S EVENTS HAD SHAKEN SIMON. HE FELT HOT AND unsteady. He wanted to go home and pull himself together before his afternoon class. As he walked across the campus toward the nearby neighborhood where he lived, the sun seemed unnaturally bright and the colors of late spring were so strong they made his eyes hurt.

  A migraine threatened him distantly tapping at his temples and turning his stomach. He wished he had his car so he didn't have to walk the four blocks to his house. Cameron Park was a very early suburb of Raleigh built in the 1920s. Now it was an island surrounded by Kenan College, a 1950s shopping district, and the downtown high school. Its streets, once paved with cobblestones, meandered around the hills and ravines of what had once been the Bloodworth estate. Most of the homes were of brick or clapboard, and retaining walls and chimneys were built of the stones that were upturned during construction.

  If you knew where to look, signs of the age of the place were everywhere. The old trolley line had run down Hillsborough Street and ended where large stone pillars marked the entrance to the neighborhood. Most of the porches still had a square cut out of the door where a milk box could be slid in by the milkman. The old carriage house, where the residents had kept their horses and broughams, still stood, although converted into an arts center. It was a fashionable location for the type of person who enjoyed old-fashioned residential urban life and scorned the strip developments and congested traffic of the new suburbs. Simon found it similar in atmosphere to the neighborhood in Queens, New York, where his mother had been raised.

  By the time Simon reached the Craftsman bungalow that was his home, he knew that something other than the overall gruesomeness of the morning was bothering him. But he decided to worry about it later and concentrate instead on pulling himself together for his afternoon class.

  Simon took two prescription headache pills, got a Coke out of his refrigerator, turned on the local oldies radio station on his stereo, and climbed into his only shower, which was on the first floor, next to the kitchen. His upstairs bathroom had an ancient footed tub, which was not conducive to the kind of repair his body and soul needed right now. He turned on the water, sat down, and chugged his Coke. His water heater was probably original to the house, which was built in 1926, so the hot water only lasted through three songs. When the water became lukewarm, he turned it off, but he stayed sitting on the floor of the shower to finish his Coke. Mercifully, this radical treatment stopped the development of his headache and quelled the insistent nausea in his stomach.

  Simon went upstairs to dress. He paused in front of the mirror to check for bags under his eyes, and he decided that they were not too pronounced, despite lack of sleep and the morning's events. Simon was a small man, which had never bothered him except for the irritation he suffered when looking for clothes. But being a university professor allowed him to wear anything he wanted, and since his undergraduate days, he had lived in jeans, polo shirts or turtlenecks, sneakers, and any jacket he could find to fit. Occasionally, he wore a knit tie.

  Simon had played baseball in high school and college; he biked to work, and he had visited the local batting cage regularly until recently. He was still in reasonably good shape, with a well-developed chest and arms and slim legs and waist.

  From his Jewish mother, Simon had inherited black—almost glossy—curly hair, which he kept short, brown eyes, and a Semitic nose. From his Irish father, whose family had lived in the mountains of North Carolina for generations, he got an engaging smile, a sense of humor, and his romantic nature. He was the only child of parents who had married late but were devoted. His father had been a classics professor at Appalachian State; his mother was a public-health nurse who had met his father while working at a rural mountain clinic. His parents died when he was in college, but his father's family in Boone and his Jewish relatives in New York City fought over his vacations, deluged him with care packages, and made him feel loved, even though he was on his own after the age of twenty.

  In high school, Simon's academic prowess had isolated him somewhat. Only his starting position at second base on the varsity baseball team kept him from being considered a complete nerd. In college, though, as often happens, his intelligence became a social asset, and he found himself in the midst of a large circle of friends, both men and women. As an undergraduate, he attended Duke University in Durham, his parents' alma mater, from which he graduated summa cum laude in history. For graduate school, he defected to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Then he surprised everyone by accepting a teaching position at Kenan College. Simon wanted to teach undergraduates and live in North Carolina. Kenan and its environs became his home, and he had no intention of leaving, even when he developed his doctoral thesis into a best-selling book, The South Between the World Wars, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was catapulted to academic stardom two years ago.

  Simon stayed on an even keel during the uproar that followed his receiving the Pulitzer. Kenan was ecstatic, issuing press releases wildly and giving him tenure several years before it was customary. He received telegrams and phone calls from people he could hardly place. His publisher flew him to New York, put him up in one of those fancy hotels where they give you a free bathrobe to use, sent him to the awards ceremony in a limousine, and threw him a huge party. He was even scheduled to appear on the Today show, but he was bumped when O. J. Simpson was indicted for murder. He didn't mind, though. He had a great time in the green room talking to Ray Charles, who got bumped, too, and took away a souvenir Today coffee mug with Charles's autograph on it.

  After his brief exposure to fame,
Simon returned happily to his life. Not so his wife, Tessa, who had loved the glamour and excitement of celebrity and who complained bitterly about the boredom of their everyday existence when life returned to normal. Simon, who had never been bored a day in his life, expected her to adjust in time.

  Tessa adjusted by packing her things onto a carrier on the top of her Mustang and leaving for a job as a TV production assistant on a soap opera in New York City. Simon was devastated. They had been together since graduate school—she taught high school just a few blocks away. He liked being married. He wanted a home and a family more than most men, probably to replace the one he had lost when his parents died. He seriously underestimated Tessa's restlessness, and he probably hastened her departure by suggesting that they have a baby.

  Simon would never forget standing on the sidewalk begging her not to go, then watching her drive away from him. In retrospect, Simon realized that she hadn't chosen their life—he had. His job had brought them to Raleigh. He had bought the house in the neighborhood where he wanted to live. He had taken his parents' things out of storage—the Steinway, the Oriental rugs, the countless books that filled two walls downstairs and the third bedroom upstairs—and furnished the house. Tessa had never complained. She had seemed happy. Why had she thrown her lot in with his if it wasn't what she wanted? Charitably, Simon supposed she didn't know what she wanted until too late to avoid hurting him.

  Simon walked downstairs and into the small kitchen and opened his refrigerator door. Three Cokes was not much sustenance for standing in front of a classroom all afternoon, but he was never hungry anymore. He knew he had to eat, so he took a container of cherry vanilla yogurt out of the refrigerator and sat at his kitchen table to force it down himself.

  After she left, Tessa had not responded to any of his attempts to contact her. When one of his cousins spotted her in Macy's, she simply said that she thought it was best that way. Best for her, maybe. When Simon realized how complete his loss was, he took an emotional nosedive. He was barely able to finish the semester's work. His troubled condition was so obvious that his friends worried about him aloud and everyone else talked about him behind his back. The chair of the history department, Walker Jones, came into his office one day shortly before the semester ended and gave him a kind but firm ultimatum: Get help or take a leave of absence.